Baldwin Reminds Shia, "I'm Not Your Fucking Chief"

The still-simmering Alec Baldwin/Shia LaBeouf feud is starting to mesmerize me—mostly because it's not really a feud. It's like a nerdy kid is trying to pick a fight with the captain of the football team, and Mr. QB Handsome has to keep telling ​him to back down before he gets hurt. Today, for no reason at all, LaBeouf released some new emails. Once again, they're more puzzling than enlightening, and they seem to make him look bad. The highlight:

Baldwin: “We start Monday. But I’m so fucking tired.”

LaBeouf: “I’m a hustler. I don’t get tired. I’m 26, chief.”

Baldwin: “Listen, boy. I’m not your fuckin’ chief. You got that? Ha. Hahahahaha. Let’s go.”

What does this tell us about the creative process of famous actors? Nothing. But it’s a nice reminder that most actors are children at heart, incapable of letting someone else have the last word. Shia LaBeouf is clearly not cut out from Broadway, and it was good of him to quit the show as soon as he realized that. Remember—he didn’t force these producers to cast him. They picked him for the sake of name recognition, and nothing more. If he’s being excoriated for cutting and running, I think it’s because the critical establishment feels like it’s been cheated out of a pan.

And Alec Baldwin? Well, I’m happy to see that in private email conversations, he’s just as crazy as I like to imagine. If LaBeouf thinks he can turn New York against Baldwin with screenshots of fairly innocuous emails, he’s proved something I’ve long said about film actors. A job that requires you to work for no more than 45 seconds at a time does not do much for your capacity for critical thought.

​I've got more on the "feud" as a whole over at Bullett​. Check it out, fella.

'Mean Girls' Musical Makes Me Say 'Yeah.'

There's gonna be a Mean Girls musical!

Maybe!

Wow!

Is it just me, or were people talking about the SAG Awards more than usual this year? I’m all for the Screen Actor’s Guild as an institution, but I don’t really give a damn about the big awards shows, much less the small ones. My carefully cultivated web bubble was punctured last night by aimless jabber about who was wearing what at SAG. Perhaps this is a sign of cosmic upheaval in Hollywood—perhaps it’s because I started following lifetime achievement award-winner Dick Van Dyke. (Yep, he’s alive, he’s a friend of dolphins, and he’s married to a woman who hadn’t been born when his show went off the air. Way to go, Dick!)

Among the SAG-chatter came one compelling tidbit: Tina Fey’s long-rumored Mean Girls musical is, apparently, nearly a sure thing.

Tons of details if you just click here. Actually, there are no details. None at all! Nobody knows anything! There is no timeline for this project, no guarantee it will happen, no information at all as to what it may look like when it does. Probably there will be some dancing.

Dancing! Wow!

I Guess This Means 'Mad Men: Wales' Is Out

Banning smoking in public places did not start with Mayor Mike. Ireland was the first place I remember reading about a smoking band, and the trend soon spread to the rest of the British Isles. Wales jumped on board in 2007, banning smoking in "enclosed and substantially enclosed" public places. Presumably that means that my freelancer's shanty, which is substantially enclosed against the wind and cold, would be a no go.

Such bans are common worldwide, but Wales has taken the enforcement one step farther, banning actors from lighting up on period film sets—a prohibition that, BBC Wales says, is a big pain in the ass. For shows like the revamped Upstairs Downstairs, , scenes featuring cigarettes must be shot in far-away England, where everything is much more expensive. Casualty was forced to drop a storyline in which a dropped cigarette set a hotel on fire, because doing it in a country where they use Ls sensibly proved too expensive. They go on:

The current legislation in Wales makes it impossible to film a lit cigarette as part of a scene. This is problematic for period dramas, which often feature cigarettes as a fact of period life. It is especially difficult to truthfully capture big, emotional moments in close-up shots, where fake cigarettes or CGI don’t create an honest effect.

By fake cigarettes, I assume they mean the herbal ones used on stage and in shows like Mad Men? I've watched a lot of people smoke, on film and in real life, and have never found Don Draper's Old Gold's to be anything but realistic. Though non-addictive, they're not much better for you than regular cigarettes, and the pains of doing take after take drawing smoke into your lungs must take its toll. What's more, they're awful to smoke. In an Esquire interview a couple of years ago, John Slattery called them "Terrible."

"They're like smoking sand," he said. "You take a drag and you've got half the cigarette in your mouth and half on your pants. You're trying to act smooth and you're on fire!"

Or has Wales said no to those as well?

The BBC complaint is especially interesting to a yank, who imagines the BBC to be more beholden to the government than they actually are. They're right to complain about the ban. I'm all for keeping smoking out of public places—although I sometimes wonder if bars shouldn't be allowed to choose—but for god's sake, it's a film set! People know it isn't real!

As far as theater goes, I assume this means that Welsh audiences have been treated to five years of actors picking cigarettes up, holding them for a minute, and putting them back down. I always find smoking on stage a bit distracting. Actors have so much other things to do that it's almost impossible to smoke naturally. Whenever a Broadway actor lights up, all I can think is, "Boy, I bet he doesn't smoke in real life. Those vocal chords are valuable!" That said, period productions need a certain blue smoke haze. Grow up, Wales. Let our actors smoke.

Mulan Saved China, and B.H. Barry Saved "Mulan"

It doesn't take much for a play to leave me glowing. All I want is to see a good script handled intelligently, with no slow parts, some strong performances, and nothing pretentious to get in the story's way. That doesn't sound like much, but those who see a lot of plays know it's more rare than you think. Golden Boy, playing on Broadway for the next week, is one of those happy exceptions. I saw it on Friday, and haven't quit buzzing since. It's a gorgeous production, and it has a bit of Grade A stage combat, directed by Grade A fight director B.H. Barry. I spoke to Barry yesterday afternoon, about Golden Boy, Treasure Island and Mulan. 

Boxing is so essential to this play—what challenges did you find in designing Golden Boy's combat?

It was one of the strangest challenges ever. All the company went into boxing lessons, and they finished up knowing a lot more about boxing than I did. But the guy playing Golden Boy [Seth Numrich] was not quite as fast as the other boxers, so I had to slow them down.

What they learned was a modern style of boxing, so I had to reorganize what they learned into something that was more theatrical. I mentioned to them that they had to make the hero look better than they were. One of the guys who was really good, he was very, very fast, so I made him an old slugger—someone used to throwing his punches really heavy, a guy who had been beaten up a lot in his life. 

What I do is, I try to tell stories through fights. Just doing the fights themselves, anyone can do that. It has to be about character, and it has to tell the story. 

It's one of the more fun interviews I've done in a while. Read the rest over at Bullett, and move heaven and earth to see Golden Boy if you can. I've got the film version on my DVR and am planning on watching it this week. If you're lucky, I'll tell you how I like it.

The Half-Baked Spring Preview You've Been Waiting For

There are plenty of awful things about January, but it's not all bad. As we stagger across the hellish waste that is the first month of 2013, there are plenty of things to look forward to. More specifically, there are four.

Once, summer was dead. Heat choked New York City, forcing culture-consuming citizens to flee boiling theaters for polo grounds of the Hamptons or the sideshows of Coney Island. Even after air conditioning made culture possible year-round, the arts have never really given up the summer break. Opera is strictly a cold-weather pursuit. Almost no Broadway plays dare risk a July opening. Until cable TV upended the schedule, summertime on the tube meant reruns, game shows and more reruns. Even film, which feasts on summertime, follows its own nine month schedule, with January, February and March serving as the dead period.

There is something reassuring about all this. How nice it is, at season’s end, to look back over the last nine months and remember when it all began. To rank your favorites, to remember the worst of the bunch, to mourn those plays or television shows that closed before their time. But even better is to be where we are now—in the middle of it all. The holidays, thank God, are behind us, and the next great wave of new stuff is about to hit. We have new plays, new operas, new TV shows, and the worst movies we will see until August. Some of it will be worth remembering—most of it will be trash. In either case, this is what I’m looking forward to loving or hating, across four formats—because in 2013, all culture is the same, so long as it’s longer than 140 characters.

But what are they, you ask? Bwahahahahahahahahaha. You have to click on it to see.

Never Be Opening———The 'Glengarry' Switcheroo

I really liked Charles Isherwood's story in the Times about the producers of Glengarry Glen Ross and their cynical decision to hold the show's opening, so I wrote a thing about it. 

Times theater critic Charles Isherwood caused a stir this week with an essay about the craven behavior of the producers of Glengarry Glen Ross, who used Hurricane Sandy as an excuse to postpone the official opening of their show by a month. While some imaginative conspiracy theorists have fantasized that this was simply a ploy to give marquee star Al Pacino a bit more time to learn his lines, Isherwood paints a more cynical picture, of producers selling high-priced tickets to something that is a preview-in-name-only, allowing them to rake in around $1 million weekly without having to face potential critical wrath.

When news came this week that Mamet’s other show on Broadway is closing—something his plays have done a lot of lately—hiding from critics suddenly seemed like a bright idea. Reviewers hated The Anarchist—a turgid think-piece about, sigh, the nature of evil and truth and stuff—and so The Anarchist died. But Glengarry might be a special case: a serious play that doesn’t need to be reviewed, because the critics can’t affect it at all.

Read it! Read it, you fools!

The Musical That Won't Die Continues Not To Die

Have you had a nasty taste in your mouth all day? Keep spitting, and it sticks around? Brush your teeth, rinse with Listerine, chug some whiskey—and it's still there? That's because Bono and the Edge are writing new songs for Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark. And something tells me that Broadway's dumbest musical isn't about to get any smarter.

This could be the worst non-Romney-related idea of 2012. Having already paid out well over $100 to see the show, I can’t imagine anyone coming back for the sake of one or two new songs. That Spider-Man congealed into anything remotely watchable is something of a miracle, and tinkering with it could undermine the fragile foundation that supports this utterly nonsensical play. If Bono and the Edge break the play, it could be bye-bye Spidey, hello Kong. (I really want to see that Australian King Kong.)

So, just how bad could this be? Here are some ideas for Bono and the Edge as they sharpen their pencils and get down to making theater magic. Note: if any of these appear in the show, I look forward to the protracted, life-shattering legal battle that will ensue. It’ll make me Broadway famous!

What are the new spidey-songs going to sound like? Well you'll just have to click and find out.

Let's Stop Making Jokes About Porno Titles, Please

When The Performers was first announced for the fall season, I thought—"Gee. A porno comedy with Cheyenne Jackson, Henry Winkler and Alicia Silverstone. That's either a very good idea or a very bad idea."

Guess which one it was!

I was just wondering, “Should I go see The Performers?” when the show’s producers made my decision for me. After seven performances, the show has closed, making it the first casualty of the fall season and one of the finest flops in recent memory. It also gave headline writers around the country an opportunity to trot out sorely-underused impotence gags. Good job, fellas!

The producers tried to cast some blame on Hurricane Sandy, but the apparent ease with which the rest of Broadway bounced back from the storm suggests that the real fault might have been the hailstorm of nasty reviews. Think there’s a connection? Oh, I don’t know.

Read on if you'd like to know which of the play's jokes—as quoted in the reviews—were the lamest. Hint: They're all tied.

Arena Stage Likes to Share

Responding to Howard Sherman and David Dower's conversation last week about the lack of reporting on Arena Stage's involvement with Virginia Woolf, I wrote this for Bullett. 

The current revival of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf opened on October 13th, the fiftieth anniversary of the show's Broadway debut, and has been greeted with the kind of praise usually reserved for Derek Jeter. Although credited as the brainchild of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company, where the production first appeared in 2010, the show was in fact a collaboration between the Chicago outfit and Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage. 

Woolf played Arena in the spring, as part of an Edward Albee festival that marked the decades-old theater's first season in their new home, the stately Mead Center for American Theater. Certain thoughtful members of the New York theater scene have complained that, as far as credit for the production goes, Arena has gotten stiffed. To right that wrong, we at Bullett put in a call to Edgar Dobie, executive director at Arena Stage.

Tell me about this production's trip from Chicago, to D.C., to New York. How did it wind up at Arena Stage?

We produced Virginia Woolf as part of the Edward Albee festival, so for us it had a huge arc, and was a really important moment for the theater. Edward is one of those authors who's involved, and who has absolute right of approval around things like selection of director and casting. Some authors don't work that way. They write it and allow it to be interpreted whatever way you want. Albee was involved in approving Pam MacKinnon as a director, and he was here for rehearsals and saw the show several times.

Pam's dream cast was [Steppenwolf ensemble members] Tracy Letts and Amy Morton, so that led to reaching out to Martha Lavey and David Hawkanson, at Steppenwolf. We discovered they had wanted to do Albee's work, and that they just hadn't done it because they couldn't reconcile Edward Albee's way of needing to approve everything with their ensemble format. What we offered was a director, Pam MacKinnon, who they wanted to work with. The vision of the author and the director began to fit like a glove.

The play was very much carefully and lovingly produced at Steppenwolf, but the spark and the opportunity for it, from our perspective, originated here. We're happy to share it.

There's more. Much more! Check it out, fella. If you didn't see my rather rambly review of the production, now you can, using the Internet.

And if anybody else needs some reporting done, just tweet about it. I'm like a superhero who doesn't have any powers but knows how to make phone calls.​